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Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
K. Toi, M. Isobe, M. Osakabe, F. Watanabe, K. Ogawa, S. Yamamoto, N. Nakajima, D. A. Spong, K. Ida, T. Ido, T. Ito, S. Morita, K. Nagaoka, K. Narihara, M. Nishiura, S. Ohdachi, S. Sakakibara, A. Shimizu, K. Tanaka, Y. Todo, T. Tokuzawa, A. Weller, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 186-193
Chapter 4. MHD | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10805
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Energetic ion-driven magnetohydrodynamic instabilities such as Alfvén eigenmodes (AEs), energetic particle modes (EPMs), and their impacts on energetic ion confinement are being studied on the Large Helical Device (LHD). The magnetic configuration of this device is three dimensional and has negative magnetic shear over a whole radial region in the low-beta regime. Two types of toroidicity-induced Alfvén eigenmodes (TAEs) are typically observed in LHD plasmas that are heated by tangential neutral beam injection: One is localized in the plasma core region near a central TAE gap and the other is a global TAE having a radially extended eigenfunction. Core-localized TAEs with even and odd radial mode parities are often observed. The global TAE is usually observed in medium- to high-beta plasmas where broad regions with low magnetic shear are present. Helicity-induced Alfvén eigenmodes (HAEs), which exist in gaps unique to three-dimensional plasmas that have both toroidal and poloidal mode couplings, were detected for the first time. Recently, reversed magnetic shear Alfvén eigenmodes (RSAEs) having characteristic frequency sweeping were discovered in reversed magnetic shear (RS) plasmas produced by intense counter-neutral beam current drive. In the RS plasma, the geodesic acoustic mode (GAM) excited by energetic ions, which is a global-type mode different from localized GAM excited by drift waves, was also detected for the first time in a helical plasma. Nonlinear couplings between RSAE and GAM modes and also between two TAEs were observed. Bursts of TAEs and EPMs often enhance radial transport and loss of energetic ions at low toroidal magnetic field (<0.75 T).